When you feel you don't fit in

Dear Children,

While it is on my mind, I thought I would address something I hope you will not have to encounter for another decade. I think most people at some point in their life feel they do not fit in. By virtue of your family history, you will actually not fit in. While there are more and more families with parents of different ethnicities, most of your classmates will not be in this situation. Certainly, we as your parents were not. But we both did grow up in a home culture that was different from the surrounding culture. And it is from that experience that I want to offer two truths that can be lifelines as you navigate these tricky waters for yourself.

1) God did not make a mistake when he made you.
2) You have an invitation to belong to God's household.

God did not make a mistake when he made you
As a young person, I often felt like a cosmic oops, that God had been distracted when he made me and that's how I ended up being a girl born to Chinese parents in the American South. Like wouldn't it have been easier if I had been born Chinese in China or White in America? Growing up, in the US I was never American enough, and in Chinese countries, I was never Chinese enough. You may feel similarly.

But something that helped me a lot was a chapel when I was in 6th grade where the speaker said, "God does not make mistakes." I don't remember the verse she was speaking on, but here is one to offer you food for thought:

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
~Psalm 139

The image here is one of God taking great care in crafting a life. God picked out your eye color, hair, nose, and mouth. And he built them on the genetic differences between Asians and Caucasians. Likewise, he knew you would have a particular cultural environment and has plans for that. Your ethnic background is not a cosmic mistake.

You have an invitation to belong to God's household
In your everyday life, you may feel like you don't fit in, you may be told you don't fit in, and you may actually not fit in. That's an awful feeling, I know. But this verse was huge for me when I was processing all of this. Listen to this:

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household,
~Paul's letter to the Ephesians

When you accept that Jesus's death and resurrection was for your sin too, you get a new citizenship and a new family. The spiritual reality is that God sweeps you into his family and loves you perfectly just as he made you. You have a place to belong. And this is true even if there are people actively telling you that you don't belong. And this is true even if the people telling you you don't belong are people who say they are Christ followers.

Now, I hope that you have a few friends who are also hapa. That y'all laugh about the weird, awkward things that come with it. And I hope you have Uncle Jonny and Uncle Kevin around to show you the ropes. But iffn you don't, I think these truths can carry you a long way.

I love you,
Mom

The temporal experience of God

Lenten musing 9

¹ I will extol the LORD at all times;
his praise will always be on my lips.

² My soul will boast in the LORD;
let the afflicted hear and rejoice.

³ Glorify the LORD with me;
let us exalt his name together.

⁴ I sought the LORD, and he answered me;
he delivered me from all my fears.

⁵ Those who look to him are radiant;
their faces are never covered with shame.

~Psalm 34

In the intervening days since I last posted, my husband and I welcomed our first child into the world. Today, she is four days old and while nursing her I read aloud the lectionary readings, including Psalm 34.

As I was reading today's passages I realized that our little girl essentially has no past and only a future. Her experiences with God and his world lay ahead of her, lines in a play yet un-performed. Unlike her, I have a past and colors my present and future. Reading scripture today, I was reawakened to the temporal experience of God. Having journeyed longer in life than our little one, I can look back and point to the places where "I sought the LORD, and he answered me", where "he delivered me from all my fears." I can choose to look to [him] as a current disposition. And I can make on going choices into the future to extol , praise, and boast in the Lord.

It is my hope and prayer that our little one will have a lifetime walking with the Lord so that she too may look into her story and see God's work and will played out time and time again, and that these memories and experiences will carry her through a life filled with praise and glory for her heavenly Father.

A different set of worries

Lenten musing 6

Be to me a rock of refuge,
to which I may continually come;
~Psalm 71

The writer here worries that the God he/she cries out to won't be there some time, won't be a refuge when approached.

In addition to the readings from the previous musing, I have continued to be bombarded it seems by reminders to pray, reminders of the centrality of prayer in the God-filled life, in the Christ-centered life. But were I to re-write this line I would write:

May I seek you as a rock of refuge,
Instead of my own competence;
~Andrea's Psalm

This is how desperate the state of prayer is for me, how much I need to learn, how far I have to go.

A little perspective

Lenten musing 4

Yesterday, my cousin asked, "Aren't you due soon?" and I wrote back, "I'm due 3/26 which is VERY soon relative to last summer or even Thanksgiving. NOT SOON ENOUGH relative to how big I feel the baby has gotten vs. how much space I think is left in there. And TOO SOON relative to how much work I want to do before the baby comes." So I'm a little conflicted.

This morning, I didn't sleep well from 5AM on wondering if I should get up and get to getting to work. Finally, at 7 I dragged my harrassed self out of bed.

I'm reading the Book of Common Prayer Daily Office Lectionary through my feedreader and this was verse 1:

Psalm 50:1 The Mighty One, God the LORD,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to its setting.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God shines forth.

Wow!

I love the expression of beauty and expansiveness, the sense of strength and reliability, the realization that my worries are small things in light of this kind of majesty.

A little perspective on an anxious morning. A little thankfulness to direct me out of my self-pity.

Choosing failure

As a language learner, I actually have a sick love of learning grammar and vocabulary. The first language I studied from scratch was Latin which was partly awesome because I didn't have to speak it...until I did. You see I went to a Latin summer camp, and we had a class in spoken Latin. Oh my. Here I was, a super Latin dork, and I couldn't string sentences together for the life of me. I learned a few stock phrases and stuck with them. No matter, it's not like I was ever going to run into a native Latin speaker.

But then I studied Russian. Same thing--learned boat loads of grammar--but this time I went to Russia and worked at a children's hospital where everyone was a Russian speaking monolingual. My speaking abilities were dreadful. Pretty much the only people I could chat up were the kids who all had psychiatric or developmental problems. For all the grammar and linguistics I knew, I could not hold a coherent conversation with adults. Agh.

To get over my grammar hangup, I developed this strategy: each day I would pick one grammatical feature and try to use that correctly. For example, everything else could fall by the wayside, but I would form the past tense correctly. I'm pretty sure that the first weeks of this I was still pretty unintelligible to the other hospital workers, but as time passed I increased my vocabulary and I got more and more comfortable with different grammatical features. 18 months later when I moved to Kazakhstan, I was pretty comfortable working in Russian and even studied Kazakh with a tutor that only spoke Russian and Kazakh. (Learning to recite math equations in Kazakh through Russian explanations was exhausting.)

I don't know if it's a Western thing or a life thing, but I find myself often inundated with "how things should be done"; 10 steps to a being a better Christian, 7 highly effective habits of a healthy marriage, how to write a dissertation in 15 minutes a day. And the thing is I actually think a lot of the advice given has merit, but there is no way for me to implement all of it now. So I choose failure in almost everything so that I can practice one thing. My "one things"right now are:

1) Pray scripture. I haven't done this in a while and I'm finding it refreshing.
2) Tell N when he pisses me off instead of stuffing it inside.
3) Touch the dissertation everyday Monday through Saturday.

So forgive me if my life looks a little herky-jerky from your end, but I just don't have it together and I can only focus on so much at any one point in time.

If you're looking for a "one thing" for yourself, I offer you this verse from my childhood:

Psalm 100

1Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

2Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

3Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

4Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

5For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.